Our Magic Hour (2 page)

‘What about him?' Katy tilting her head.

‘In the cowboy shirt? Nah,' Adam said. ‘Couldn't compete with a good wank.'

They cackled on their backs, legs in the air like beetles.

It was hard to keep track of days. Eventually there came a time when Audrey thought
she'd been at that Sunday breakfast, too. The markets swarming below, the ferry getting
smaller as it heaved away from the mainland. All three of them hungover, collapsing
on the grass together.

What Audrey knew for certain was: on Sunday evening, she and Nick made dinner for
their friends. Emy brought flowers and a cake.

Katy stood at the bench with a knife and carved radishes into tiny flowers. ‘You
put a knob of butter on it'—she held one up—‘and then you dip it in sea salt. Mum
used to do them for dinner parties. They're the best. Here—open your mouth.'

Audrey couldn't remember what time Adam arrived, or which of Nick's friends were
there. Probably Patrick, maybe Mark and Yusra.

Everyone crowded into the kitchen until Nick had the fire pit going. They ate in
the backyard, plates balanced on knees, while their faces got shadowy.

‘When I was a kid, I used to speak with this really Strine accent,' Emy said, ‘but
once I was a teenager, it was more about how I dressed—like, when I started uni I
had this horror of being mistaken for an international student. Isn't that awful.
I wore Doc Martens every single day.'

‘Because you were really alternative,' Adam grinned. She kicked his shin.

‘Look at you in that sweater, you willy,' Katy said. ‘I don't think you're in any
position to judge.'

They sat close together. It was a long dusk.

Nick and Emy washed the dishes while Audrey, Adam and Katy sat in the yard. They'd
known one another the longest. They'd been thirteen, plankton in the enormous high
school. They still fitted together in the same way ten years later.

Adam was sprawled on the banana lounge, arms tucked behind his head. Audrey and Katy
were on the plastic lawn chairs.

‘Oi, what's going on with you and Jarrod?' Adam asked, turning to Katy.

‘I don't know. I think it's just become friendly.'

‘How so?'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Yeah, but it's shitty when things like that don't work out.'

‘We weren't together,' Katy said. ‘It's not as though it's the end of a relationship.'

‘But it's the death of an
idea
.' Only Adam could get away with that kind of sentence.
Katy looked towards the house. Nick's voice floated from the back door—
You can clean
that shit up. That'll teach you to bring an uncooperative cake. Did you even do Home
Ec? Nah, it's all right, we'll just have the ugly pieces, look—

‘But what makes you think—' Adam started.

Stop pushing
, Audrey wanted to say.

Katy was folding into herself like a telescope. ‘I don't know, I was trying to do
nice things, and—you know, sound him out, but I think maybe I was expecting too much,'
she said. Her hair, pinned in victory rolls at the start of the night, had come loose;
her lipstick had worn off.

They were silent. Nick and Emy were still carrying on in the kitchen. Emy was bellowing
I will not be lectured on misogyny by this man
. Nick roared with laughter.

Katy drove Adam home and stayed over at his house. Audrey could imagine it. Adam,
drunk and exuberant, leaning over the console.
Kiss me, Kate!
he would have said,
and she would have pecked his cheek. Audrey knew how they slept: Adam with his throat
to the gods, Katy curled beside him. She might have got up and poked around his things,
drunk a beer from the fridge, flicked on the television.

Adam said that Katy left early Monday, before he was awake. She'd made a plunger
of coffee, lukewarm by the time he found it, and written a note. Adam was hungover,
late for his nine o'clock class.

Audrey could picture Katy in her old Volvo, in the same clothes she'd worn the night
before, shaking a cigarette from its pack at the lights on Barkly Street. It was
a sunny morning. She drove to the
Dandenongs, to the reservoir at Silvan. No traffic
going away from the city. Through the window was all hairpin bends and great friendly
trees whose leaves were turning. Katy parked in the picnic area. It was still early.
When she opened the door she heard magpies.

Audrey was watching television with Nick on Monday night. She remembered everything.

She went to get more wine from the kitchen, saw Katy's coat draped over the back
of a chair.

‘Katy never came to get her coat,' she said.

In less than an hour Katy's father would call to deliver the message, and Audrey
would be crouched on the floor, lungs dragging, and Nick would be beside her, and
the coat would remain on the back of the chair in their kitchen, an exoskeleton left
behind.

When it was quiet, when Nick had fallen asleep with his hand on her back, Audrey
imagined what happened that morning—

The yellow rag tucked around the hose, neat as a swaddled baby. Yellow is the colour
of luck: newly hatched chickens, sunlight and stars in children's pictures. It has
nothing to do with the damp smell of death.

Katy's hands clasped in her lap, as though she were waiting for a bus. The witness
who wept as he gave his statement. He'd been driving a seniors group to the reservoir.
Walking back to his bus he saw the hose stretched from the exhaust to the cabin,
saw the girl's limp head from behind. He ran, wrenched at the doors and beat on the
windows, yelled through the glass.

He'd phoned an ambulance and sunk down by the car door, clumsily making the sign
of the cross, kneeling on the gravel.

Suppose the car had been newer, with a catalytic converter. Suppose someone had got
there sooner, or she'd been called into work.

Audrey was sick with it.

The Wednesday morning after, Adam sat at Audrey and Nick's kitchen table. When he
didn't have a cigarette between his knuckles, he kept his palms flat on his thighs.
His shoulders were square; his knees shuddered.

‘We all saw her on Sunday night,' he said. ‘She stayed over at mine, for fuck's sake.
I didn't realise.'

‘None of us did, mate,' said Nick.

‘Yeah, but you'd fucken think somebody—she changed, somebody should have noticed.
There were all these signs. We just ignored them.'

Audrey realised she'd been holding her breath. She thought she was going to say something
reassuring, but she just gasped: ‘Her poor parents.'

Adam covered his eyes, let out an animal noise.

Audrey touched his arm, but he drew back. ‘What's wrong with you both? Why aren't
you crying? This is
sad
!' he yelled. ‘She's—so—selfish!'

He would not be held. He crouched on the floor and sobbed.

After the funeral they all hobbled back to the Shields' house, the backdrop to Katy's
first milk teeth and last day of secondary school.

Audrey shut herself in the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub. Here was the
bud of every drunken misadventure they ever had. See
her
bending into the mirror,
smudging black dust beneath her eyes, see her with her knickers around her ankles
as she schemes from the toilet, see Adam leaning out the window with a sneaky cigarette.
Audrey lying in the empty bath, laughing at them, always the first to get drunk.

Audrey put her face to one of the big towels, tried to breathe through the thickness.

Nick was talking to friends when she returned.
C'est un vrai gentilhomme
, her mother
always said. Audrey knew he was overcome. She'd seen him standing with his hands
in his pockets outside the church. He'd held her while the pictures of Katy played
on the screen. He said it was okay when she didn't want to look.

Audrey watched everyone in their black clothes. Every day from now on was just further
away from Katy. It was a carsick feeling; it was weak arms and enervation. She'd
eulogised her friend, bastardising Montesquieu:
Here rests a girl who never rested
before
. Her father would've been proud. His was the only other funeral she'd been
to.

‘You all right?' Nick asked when they were alone.

‘Are you?'

‘Yeah.'

He watched her watching the mourners, leaned close. ‘All these people loved her,'
he said in her ear.

All the years, all the love: all wasted.

They limped outside. The city was spread below them, a neat grid of lights. Its golden
veins stretched out to the suburbs.
This is my favourite view of the city
, she'd
said at the Backwash, and Audrey had said
Mine's Ruckers Hill.
This one.

Nick turned the car keys over in his hand. Neither of them moved from the verandah.
The trees rustled, the leaves stirred. All the world was alive.

They stood still in the dusk, faces jaundiced by the streetlight.

At home Audrey stood in the kitchen. Nick switched on the kettle, loosened his tie,
went to get the mail. He took a knife from the drawer and slit open an envelope.
Audrey studied his face, the awning of his brow, his throat. He had the purposeful
Adam's apple of a thin man. His hair always needed cutting.

He stacked the rest of the mail on the table and glanced at Audrey. ‘You did good
today.'

‘What did we do after Dad's funeral?' she asked.

‘What?'

‘I don't know what to do,' she said. She was fixed to the spot. ‘I can't believe
I have work tomorrow.'

He looked at her carefully. ‘How about if I run you a shower.'

‘It's okay, Nick. I'm fine.'

He followed her into the bedroom.

‘There was a Lou Reed doco on SBS,' he said. ‘After your dad's. We came home and
we were both spent, and we watched that. You were worried Sylvie would—you know—so
you kept calling her.'

‘That's right,' Audrey said.

‘You were wearing that dress.'

Audrey reached behind for the zip and tugged at it.

‘Could you—' She turned her back to Nick. His body appeared behind hers in the mirror.
She was still wearing her heels. Even with the false height, he was a head taller.
He brushed her hair to the side and caught her eye in the reflection as he fiddled
with the dress.

He smiled. ‘You always want to try yourself before you let me help you.'

She felt a release. Nick drew the zip all the way down, kissed the back of her neck,
her spine. The dress was slipping off her shoulders and Nick's mouth was there and
she was surprised, then, at how close she wanted him. But in the shower, when they
fucked slowly, wet skin on skin, Audrey thought it made sense, after all, since there
was nothing left to say.

Months afterwards, that was how she recalled it. But things might have been different.

Strange Triangles

Audrey could hear voices inside before she rang the doorbell. She banged on the glass
pane. Giddy laughter: her brother's, and a girl's. The rain fell while she waited
on the front stoop. St Kilda was straggly in the wet.

Bernie escaped when he could, like Audrey, like Irène. For a while he'd shared a
flat with some other lost boys, but he lived alone now. He was happier in his new
house, a squat weatherboard with a rotting verandah and a lone fig tree in the front
yard. Audrey brought him frozen meals and paid what remained of his rent after the
government allowance he got for living out of home as a student. He attended school
occasionally. Their mother thought he was responsibly passing his VCE. She lived
alone now, too, in the old house in Tyabb that was too big for one person. Since
their father had gone, relief leaked from the whole edifice.

‘Bernie?' Audrey set her umbrella down by the door and let herself in. ‘Hello?' There
was music coming from the bedroom, summery guitars and a man's voice
.
The music of
her childhood, a song her father had listened to.

‘Come on,' the girl was laughing. ‘Fair's fair.'

‘Fair, I'll give you fair in a minute.' There was a squeal.

Audrey went to the kitchen and made an instant coffee. ‘Hey. Bernie,' she called
again. Someone turned down the music, and her brother appeared in the doorway, all
swagger and grin. He was wearing a pair of socks, underwear and a dress shirt.

‘Good morning,' he said brightly.

Audrey nodded at the doorway.

‘Company?'

‘My
girlfriend
,' he hissed, ‘is in
that
room.' He ripped open a teabag with his teeth.

‘Girlfriend.'

They stood, contemplating the cheerful, tuneless singing in the next room.

‘I don't have any money for the train. You owe me,' the girl's voice called. She
was happy; Audrey could tell without seeing her face.
‘Bernard, you owe me / some
money.'

Audrey raised her eyebrows at Bernie over the top of her mug.

‘Can I ask you a favour?' he said in a low voice. ‘Can you lend me some, quick?'

‘What?'

‘I just need forty bucks.' He saw her face. ‘Please.' Audrey fumbled for her purse.
‘Thanks,' he said. He kissed her cheek. ‘I'll pay you back.'

‘Bern, Bern, Bernie-e-e / I know you think it comes for free / But you owe me some
motherfucking money / For that motherfucking E…'

‘For what?' Audrey said. Too slow: the girl drifted into the kitchen and Bernie slapped
the notes into her palm.

‘See?' he said. ‘I told you I'd come through, so you can stop singing and catch your
train.'

‘Hullo,' the girl said, looking at Audrey. ‘I'm Hazel.'

‘Audrey. I'm Bern's sister.' They smiled at each other. Hazel put the money into
her pocket. She was a schoolgirl and a beauty,
long-limbed and unhurried. She leaned
against the fridge and held out a hand for Bernie's tea. The three of them made a
strange triangle.